One hundred years ago this month, observations performed during a total solar eclipse proved for the first time the gravitational bending of light predicted by Albert Einstein's new theory of gravity, general relativity. In this video, Günther Hasinger, ESA Director of Science, reflects on this historic measurement that inaugurated a century of exciting experiments, investigating gravity on Earth and in space and proving general relativity in ever greater detail.

Enlarge / The Electron launch vehicle is ready to soar. (credit: Rocket Lab) Welcome to Edition 2.01 of the Rocket Report! This week marks one year since the first report. What started as an experiment has grown into something that a lot of people read. So thank you for joining. And if you appreciate this weekly report and the effort that goes into it, I encourage you to subscribe to Ars Technica. It doesn't cost much, and there are perks. But mostly you'll know you're supporting independent journalism like this. Thank you for considering it. As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar. Virgin performs full-duration hotfire test. On Tuesday, Virgin Orbit announced that it had performed the "final full-duration, ...

Hey, good morning! You look fabulous. Computex is just around the corner, so companies like NVIDIA are already touting some powerful incoming PC upgrades. As of today, SpaceX has delivered its first large batch of Starlink internet satellites, and A...

Members of the public who want to send their name to Mars on NASA's Mars 2020 rover mission can get a souvenir boarding pass and their names stenciled on chips to be affixed to the rover. Sign up here. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech. NASA is giving the public an opportunity to send their names – stenciled on chips – with the Mars 2020 rover mission. The rover is scheduled to launch as early as July 2020, with the spacecraft expected to touch down on Mars in February 2021. NASA will use an electron beam to stencil the submitted names onto a silicon chip with lines of text smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair (75 nanometers). At that size, more than a million names can be written on a single dime-sized microchip. The chip (or chips) will ride on the rover under a glass cover. From now until September 30, you can add your name to the list (and obtain a souvenir boarding pass to Mars) here. NASA said that the robotic rover will search for signs of past microbial life, characterize the planet's ...

Washington (AFP) May 23, 2019 NASA on Thursday unveiled the calendar for the "Artemis" program that will return astronauts to the Moon for the first time in half a century, including eight scheduled launches and a mini-station in lunar orbit by 2024. The original lunar missions were named for Apollo - Artemis was his twin sister in Greek mythology, and the goddess of hunting, wilderness and the Moon. Administrator J

Washington (UPI) May 21, 2019 Without the moon and water, life on Earth wouldn't be possible. New research out of Germany suggests both were delivered by Theia, which collided with Earth 4.4 billion years ago. Scientists have long puzzled over the origins of Earth's water. Earth was formed in the inner solar system, and the inner solar system was dry. The solar system's wet materials were relegated to the outer sola